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Monthly Archives: October 2018

Mrs. Fay Buck, a woman well known in the Tenderloin, was arrested in Sacramento yesterday on a warrant sworn out by Mrs. Rose Decker of 236 Mason street, charging her with grand larceny. Mrs. Buck formerly lived with Mrs. Decker, and it is alleged that she got into her landlady’s wardrobe one day, got all her finery and then went to Sacramento.

— San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 1904

Fay Buck was in big trouble, arrested for stealing clothing and furs valued at $540 (more than $15,000 in 2018). Despite the dire circumstances she found herself in Fay obviously took the time to style her hair. The updo she sported in her mugshot is nothing short of magnificent.

If you’re wondering why Rose Decker, Fay’s “landlady,” had such valuable clothes, the answer is because she was a madam who ran a “sporting house” in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Dressing well would have been a necessity of the job.

Fay testified that she’d arrived in San Francisco without money or friends and had been enticed into a “house of ill-repute.” She said she’d stolen the clothes in order to turn them into cash and escape from a “life of shame.”

Stealing nice clothes was a practice Fay might have learned from Rose. A few months before Fay absconded with Rose’s clothes, Rose herself stole a trunk full of the belongings of Nellie Bennett, one of the working girls in her house. Nellie was late on her rent to the tune of $110 (over $3000 in 2018) so Rose figured she’d help herself to the trunk, which contained clothing and photographs of Nellie’s admirers. Nellie agreed to drop the charges and give the clothes up as long as the photos were returned to her.

William P. Lawlor, California Supreme Court Historical Society

Fay wasn’t so lucky. Rose pursued the charges and Fay was convicted of grand larceny. When she appeared before Judge William P. Lawlor for sentencing, in February 1905, she begged for probation. In support of her plea she presented a letter that her husband, J. Douglass Bucke, had written to the court from his home in Butte, Montana.

Douglass wrote that Fay had always been of good character. He took responsibility for her plight, writing that he should have met her at the dock when she landed in San Francisco. Evidently the plan had been for Fay to travel on her own from her home in Washington State via San Francisco to Montana. How she could do that without funds was an unanswered question. Douglass claimed he was “unable to appear in person to plead for one whom I love and who is alone in the world with the exception of myself.”

Judge Lawlor wanted to hear from Douglass in person so he postponed Fay’s sentencing for a month. The month went by and Douglass wrote again, saying he was now sick in the hospital and couldn’t travel.

Prison Matron Matilda Christ

A few more weeks went by and still no Douglass. Tired of waiting for him to show up, Judge Lawlor placed Fay on probation in the care of Matilda Christ, a matron at the San Francisco City Prison. Matilda agreed to be Fay’s guardian and to provide a “good home” in the house she shared with her sister’s family. The deal was that Fay would be paid $10 a month to take care of Matilda’s young niece.

Six weeks later Fay absconded to Seattle. Matilda accused Fay of stealing two of her rings and some of her clothes and underwear. Judge Lawlor put out a bench warrant for Fay. She was arrested in July 1905 and hauled back into court.

Instead of the nanny job she’d been promised, Fay told the judge that Matilda had forced her to work as a waitress in a restaurant. According to Fay, Matilda also made her turn over much of her salary to pay for her room and to pay back a loan she made to Fay for clothing purchases.

After a few weeks of long, tiring days at the restaurant Fay claimed that Matilda came up with an alternative. She suggested that she could rent a flat for Fay to “solicit men” for sex and they’d share in the profits!

Disgusted by the idea and unwilling to return to that life, Fay ran away from Matilda’s home.

Matilda was “white with rage” when she heard the story Fay told the judge and strongly denied it. However she admitted that Fay hadn’t stolen anything from her — she’d found the items in her house and “forgot” to tell the court about it.

Judge Lawlor found no hard evidence of the bordello scheme — it was the word of one woman against the other. However he gave Matilda a “severe censure” for not telling the court she’d been mistaken about Fay stealing from her. She was forced to resign from her job as prison matron.

Fay admitted during one of her many court hearings that she wasn’t actually married to Douglass Bucke.

Judge Lawlor said he “didn’t believe Fay was of the criminal class” and released her on probation into the custody of the Mother Superior of St. Catherine’s Home for wayward girls. She later married Douglass but filed for divorce from him on the grounds of desertion in July 1907.

St. Catherine’s Home in 1925, Online Archive of California

Judge Lawlor was promoted to associate justice of the California Supreme Court in 1915. He held the position until his death in 1926.

Rose Decker continued to have run-ins with the San Francisco Police throughout the first decade of the 20th century. The Hotel Nikko San Francisco now stands where her bordello was located in 1904.

Featured photo: Fay Buck, December 10, 1904, Bureau of Identification, San Francisco Police Department. Collection of the author.

Tangled skeins of evidence which are being closely investigated by the authorities may result in the unearthing of one of the largest gangs of white slavers in the country with headquarters in New York City and also in other cities, as the result of the arrest of Mrs. Marie Chin Wore of Chenango street, who was taken shortly after midnight by Chief Detective Loren W. Rummer and Detective Larry Abel, police officials declared today.

— Press and Sun-Bulletin (Binghamton, New York), February 28, 1920

A young girl was found wandering in the vicinity of New York City’s Bowery in February 1920. She was taken to a Christian missionary society where she told authorities a disturbing story about having been forced to become the “child wife” of a much older man.

The missionary who took care of the girl after she was found, Mary E. Banta, claimed the child was born “Frances Michaelson” to Morris and Sadie Michaelson in New York City and that she was placed in a foundling home nine days after her birth in 1908. Mary also claimed that Marie Chin Wore became the girl’s foster mother 1916 and legally adopted her in 1919, changing her name to “Anna Chin Wore.”

Harry Chin Wore

In 1919 Marie arranged for Anna to marry David Lee Nong. A California-born man of Chinese ancestry, David owned a restaurant in Binghamton, New York. After the marriage, according to the 1920 census, Marie, age 32, and her Chinese husband, Harry Chin Wore, age 44, lived with Anna and David. Marie worked as a waitress in David’s restaurant and Harry ran a nearby laundry. Anna, age 16, was listed on the census as Marie and Harry’s biological daughter. Marie’s birthplace was listed as “Greece” and Anna’s as “New York.” Marie’s native language was recorded as “Greek.”

Less than two months after the marriage Anna stole enough money from David to escape to New York City.

Mary Banta took Anna back to Binghamton. Marie was arrested there and charged with abduction.

Anna had on a dress that was much too large for her in her wedding photo. News photo, collection of the author.

Marie and her lawyer in court

Marie testified in court to being an opium addict and said she was in the clutches of a gang of Chinese criminals who dealt opium and smuggled Chinese men and drugs across the border of Canada into the United States. She claimed that David Lee Nong was part of the gang and that there was an opium den in the basement of his restaurant. Rumors of “white slavery” swirled around the case. News stories proclaimed that Marie went by multiple aliases and had been imprisoned several times in the penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island in New York City, but no proof of these claims was provided.

However Marie showed no signs of being addicted to opium or any other drug. Opium wasn’t found in the basement of David’s restaurant or anywhere on the premises, nor was the gang of criminals located. She appeared to be nervous but unrepentant and angry in court, at times shaking her head and sneering at Anna while she gave her testimony.

Anna testified that she was unsure of her age but had been told she was between 11 and 13 years old. She said that Marie “told me that my mother was a dirty Jew and had thrown me into an ash can, where a policeman had found me.” She recalled living in the foundling home in New York City and attending school in Manhattan before Marie removed her from the institution.

David Lee Nong’s restaurant

David, who was arrested as a material witness but wasn’t charged, testified that it was the custom in China for children to marry very young but he claimed he hadn’t known that Anna was only 11. He paid about $700 ($10,214 in 2018 dollars) to Marie and Harry to help them move to Binghamton and set Harry up in a laundry business. Nonetheless the cash was seen as a quid pro quo for his marriage to Anna.

Marie and David applied for and received a license for his marriage to Anna on November 20, 1919, but when they tried to get a judge to perform the ceremony, he refused due to Anna’s youth. Next they went to a local Baptist minister who agreed to perform the marriage after Marie lied to him, telling him that Anna was 16 and the marriage was out of necessity because she was pregnant.

Anna testified that a few weeks after the marriage, Marie took her to a hotel in Worcester, Massachusetts, and forced her to commit “a statutory offense” with a Chinese man who was unnamed.

There was no evidence that Harry Chin Wore was directly involved in the marriage plot but he was found to be in the country illegally under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. He was ordered deported to back China. Marie was offered a suspended sentence as long as she agreed to be deported to China with him. The couple was taken by the Binghamton sheriff, in June 1920, to San Francisco and put on a steamship bound for China.

As she waited to sail, Marie gave an intriguing interview to a reporter for the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin.

I was born in China and I speak Chinese even better than English, although my parents were Americans. In fact, I came to America to be educated and was graduated from the University of Maine, later graduating as a trained nurse at the Portland, Maine general hospital. We were married in Canton, China, and I have no wish to terminate that marriage by taking advantage of the fact that my husband is debarred from the United States. I can be of great service to humanity in the Far East both by sympathy and education and even feel more at home there than in the land that was formerly mine only by parental tie.

Anna was sent to New York City, with missionary Mary E. Banta as her guardian, where she would attend school under the care of the missionary society. Mary sued in the New York Supreme Court to have Anna’s marriage annulled.

David lost his restaurant due to the unsavory publicity about the case. In February 1922 he pleaded not guilty to a charge of gambling at a Binghamton cafe. He died of liver cancer on July 10, 1922 in the Binghamton city hospital. He was 42 years old.

Before condemning David’s role in the case it’s important to realize that U.S. immigration laws in the late nineteenth century resulted in there being few females in America for Chinese men to marry and mixed marriages, while not outlawed in New York, were frowned upon. The marriage age in New York, with parental consent, was 14 at the time and it’s only recently been changed to 17.

Questions about Anna’s parentage went unanswered. If what Mary Banta said was true and Morris Michaelson was her father, he was likely white and Jewish. Therefore her mother must have been Asian. That would have been an unusual pairing for the time, though not impossible. Several young men named Morris Michaelson, all of them white, lived in New York City, according to the 1910 census, but none of them had a wife named Sadie or a wife who was Asian, though she may have died shortly after the child’s birth and that could explain why the baby was placed in an institution.

The New York Extracted Birth Index lists a Frances Michaelson who was born in March 19, 1908 (the exact birthdate Mary Banta claimed was Anna’s) and there’s an Anna Michaelson, born in 1908, who was a resident of the New York Foundling Hospital and Children’s Aid Society until 1915. But there’s no way to definitively link either of those girls with Anna Chin Wore.

Could Anna have been, as one newspaper suggested, the biological daughter of Marie and a Chinese man who wasn’t her husband? Could that be why the baby was placed in an orphanage and why Marie lied about her relationship to Anna after she got the child back — to hide that fact from Harry Chin Wore?

This case is full of perplexing clues but short on verifiable facts. We’ll never know if Marie had good intentions when she arranged a marriage for Anna or if she sold her to the highest bidder.

Featured photos: March 1920 news photos of Marie Chin Wore (left) and Anna Chin Wore. Collection of the author.

A lady slipped on the pavement in a street in Philadelphia and was aided to arise by a very polite gentleman. She thanked him kindly and was struck by his handsome eyes, which haunted her until she missed her pocket-book and discovered through the police that a noted pickpocket known as “Baltimore Pat” was their owner, and that his attentions were part of his daily duty of “buzzing.”

Imagine her embarrassment, not to mention discomfort, when she lost her footing and fell to the ground on a busy city street. Like every well-off woman in 1860, she wore a tight corset and an unwieldy hoop skirt. How did she get up without entirely losing her dignity?

1861 day dresses, Godey’s Lady’s Book

Her tears were on the verge of overflowing when a young man came to her rescue. He leaned down and offered her his arm. She gratefully accepted and he easily pulled her to her feet. He smiled at her and asked if she was all right. With a blush she answered that she was fine. He nodded his hat, wished her a good day and vanished into the crowded street. She brushed off her skirts, reinstated her dignity and continued to her destination.

She arrived at the shop and selected an item to purchase but she couldn’t find her purse anywhere. Embarrassed, she left and went to the police station where she reported that her purse had been stolen. The police told her that she’d been “moll-buzzed” and showed her some photos in their rogues’ gallery. Suddenly it dawned on her why the striking-looking man had been so helpful. She pointed to a photo labeled “John William, alias Baltimore Pat.”

Pickpockets who specialized in preying on women were called “moll-buzzers.” Baltimore Pat’s good looks no doubt helped him professionally. Numerous articles describing his thievery and arrests appeared in newspapers between 1857 and 1862.

— The Daily Exchange, Baltimore, Maryland, April 4, 1860

If a female victim was not available he was willing to prey on men. One Saturday night in 1862 he picked the pocket of a Baltimore merchant, B. J. Sutton, to the tune of $1,240 ($30,956 in 2018).

The arrests didn’t slow him down. He worked on trains and streetcars — a pickpocket’s paradise — where people were crowded together affording plentiful opportunity for stealthy theft. Allan Pinkerton warned about moll-buzzers in his 1884 book Thirty Years a Detective.

The scene is an ordinary street car, and the seats are all occupied. The thief enters and at once takes up his position immediately in front of the lady, with one hand he grasps the strap hanging from the roof, and the other hand is seemingly thrust into his coat pocket. I say seemingly, for really the hand of the thief is thrust through his coat, the end of which is resting carelessly on the pocket of the lady. With the hand which is pushed through his coat, the thief quietly pulls up the edge of the overskirt worn by the lady, little by little, so he can reach the pocket…and then catching hold of the pocket-book, he draws it up and into his own pocket and then steps away.

His photograph ended up in a police rogues’ gallery, likely in Baltimore or Philadelphia. Whether it helped end his pickpocketing is a matter of conjecture.

Featured photo: “John William, al Baltimore Pat, Pick pocket” from Rogues, A Study of Characters by Samuel G. Szabó. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Like this:

Hollywood, Cal., police watching Mrs. Eleanor Hansen, 42, devour a ham and egg breakfast at the police station following her arrest Tuesday for the fatal shooting of her husband, Hans Terkel Hansen, 50, movie studio employe (sic), believe her word that she was “desperate with hunger.”

— Des Moines Tribune (Des Moines, Iowa), October 3, 1934

Forty-two-year old Eleanor Hansen looks like she shared a joke with the photographer while he took her mugshot at the California Institution for Women in Tehachapi. Her body language also conveys a cocky “hey bud, let’s get this over with” attitude. Based on the crime she’d committed three months earlier, Eleanor had an impatient streak.

Eleanor went to see her ex-husband, Hans, at his Los Angeles rooming house in early October 1934 because he was behind in his $10 monthly support payment ($191 in 2018). She told him she and their 13-year-old daughter, Barbara, hadn’t eaten in several days. Hans responded with a remark that Eleanor took as an insult, so she shot him twice, killing him instantly.

She fled the scene and headed to Barbara’s junior high school where the police arrested her an hour later. She explained that she didn’t go to her ex-husband’s lodgings intending to shoot him, but she simply needed money because she and Barbara were sick from hunger. But his insult was the final straw that tipped her over the edge.

“I killed him because he had it coming. He owed me $400 alimony. I had no money. I went to see him to get money for food, not to kill him,” she told police.

When Hans insulted Eleanor he disregarded the old adage “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Not to mention that hunger is high on the pyramid of needs and when it takes over the brain, irrational thoughts and crazy actions can result.

Taking no chances, the police took Eleanor to a restaurant and made sure she got fed before they interrogated her.

His landlady, Ella Horton, said Hans was living on bread he got from the county and had given Eleanor his last 15 cents a few days earlier. She also claimed he’d just recently gotten a job as a film studio carpenter but he hadn’t been paid yet and owed her money too. It was all right, though. I was glad to help him,” she said.

Could jealousy have played a role in Hans’s murder?

The son of Danish immigrants, Hans was born in Nebraska and worked on his family’s farm as a young man. According to news reports he’d worked as an astrologer and had several film star clients. He’d also been employed an instructor at the Hollywood School of Astrology and had several other careers along the way. He was married and divorced prior to his marriage to Eleanor and he lost custody of his son from the previous marriage to his ex-wife’s new husband, so father of the year he was not.

Eleanor must have been convinced that Hans had some money squirreled away or something worth pawning, because she took a gun with her when she confronted him at his rooming house. Of course it’s possible she planned to kill him and the late alimony payment was just a cover, however she was convicted of second-degree murder, which argues against planning.

Sentenced to five years to life,“I still think I got a rotten deal,” Eleanor commented before she went to prison. Apparently death seemed to her to be a less rotten deal than imprisonment. Looking prosperous, Eleanor cast a glance over her shoulder on her way to Tehachapi and a news photographer captured the moment.

By 1940 Eleanor was an inmate in the Stockton State Hospital for the Insane. Barbara spent her teen years in foster care, but mother and daughter were reunited at some point because she and her children were mentioned in Eleanor’s obituary. Eleanor spent her later years in Auburn, California, where she died at the age of 71 on April 6, 1964.

Featured photo: Eleanor M. Hansen, prison mugshot. Collection of the California State Archives in Sacramento.

Thanks to Kate Griffiths for suggesting this story for Captured and Exposed. If you haven’t read Kate’s blog, Photobooth Journal, check it out!